This book is an empirical, quantitative, and qualitative study of nineteenth-century English grammar writing, and of nineteenth-century language change. Based on 258 grammar books from Britain and North America, it investigates whether grammar writers of the time noticed the language changing around them, and how they reacted. In particular, this book shows that not all features undergoing change were noticed in the first place, and those that were noticed were not necessarily criticized. The features investigated include variable past tense forms, where variation was often simply acknowledged ... More

This book is an empirical, quantitative, and qualitative study of nineteenth-century English grammar writing, and of nineteenth-century language change. Based on 258 grammar books from Britain and North America, it investigates whether grammar writers of the time noticed the language changing around them, and how they reacted. In particular, this book shows that not all features undergoing change were noticed in the first place, and those that were noticed were not necessarily criticized. The features investigated include variable past tense forms, where variation was often simply acknowledged; the decline of the BE-perfect, where the older form was criticized emphatically; the rise of the progressive, which was embraced enthusiastically; the rise of the progressive passive, which was one of the most violently hated constructions of the time; and the rise of the GET-passive, which was only rarely commented on. Throughout the book, nineteenth-century grammarians are given a voice, and the discussions in grammar books of the time are portrayed. The book’s quantitative approach for the first time makes it possible to investigate majority and minority positions in the discourse community of nineteenth-century grammar writers, and the changes in accepted opinion over time. Although grammar writing in the nineteenth century was very openly prescriptivist, the studies in this book can show that many prescriptive dicta contained interesting grains of descriptive detail, and that eventually prescriptivism had only a small-scale, short-term effect on the actual language used.